I hear quite often that prostitution would be a wonderfully pleasant industry if it were only legal, which does not square with the experiences of countries where it is legal or tolerated. You pretty much have to be running schoolgirls out of homeroom to get the Nagoya police to so much as glance in your direction, but Japanese prostitution is a very, very ugly place to be, and much of it is based on trafficking.
I live two hundred feet from a "Korean aesthetic salon" which is open at three A. One of the not-so-young ladies who works there has taken to sleeping on the bus bench across the street recently, in heat which has nearly sent me to the hospital twice. You may have heard that Japan has a storied relationship with its Korean immigrants. Those who do -- to use a nauseating euphemism -- the jobs Japanese girls won't do can expect neglect from polite society, because polite society knows that inquiring into her circumstances means they have to know what goes on in those walls, and they are very interested in keeping up the fiction that they do not know what goes on in those walls.
Or take the European experience. Amsterdam, city of lights, so much more sophisticated than the American puritans, perfectly legal thriving sex trade, right? It has been taken over by Russian mafia who are undercutting the locals via use of trafficked girls from Eastern Europe. You always have the option as a merchant of sex slaves to one-up what the "morally upright prostitutes" allow, safe in the knowledge that they will cover for you because an investigation into what you are doing harms their business interests.
Society, meanwhile, has no great desire to actually police what happens inside of brothels, preferring to believe its sanity-saving fictions like "she wants to be there", "it is just sex between two consenting adults", and "no slaves live on my block. Prostitution, legal or otherwise, is not pretty. It is based, root and branch, on exploitation. To the extent you think that legalizing it will end the exploitation, you believe something which is contrary to reality.
I'm confused here - according to Wikipedia, coital prostitution is illegal in Japan. That isn't the model pushed by most advocates of legal prostitution that I've heard - most want prostitution to be legal in the same way that restaurants are.
